Cleopatra Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Updated on October 9, 2026

Verdict: A lush, fiercely voiced reclamation of Egypt’s last pharaoh with genuine emotional weight and a superb audiobook, undercut by a narrator who foreshadows everything and a queer thread far quieter than its reputation.

Best for: Readers who want mythic historical fiction told by a woman taking her story back, who are happy for the love stories to be with Caesar and Antony, and who will accept a bisexual heroine whose bond with a woman stays mostly between the lines.

Heat level: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5 — behind closed doors)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.6/5 — a 3.90 Goodreads average across 18,206 ratings, marked down for heavy-handed framing and a sapphic element this site’s readers should calibrate for)

Tropes: Historical retelling, reclaimed villainess, first-person confession from the afterlife, divine gifts, royal sibling rivalry, political marriage, forbidden love, age-gap affair, devoted handmaiden, bisexual heroine.

Cleopatra by Saara El-Arifi is a traditionally published standalone — Ballantine in the US, HarperCollins in the UK — that recasts Egypt’s last pharaoh as the narrator of her own life, speaking from beyond death to the historians who called her a seductress, in a historical novel threaded with the gods’ gifts and set against a Rome that wants her country and a family that wants her throne.

It has a 3.90 average across 18,206 Goodreads ratings and 3,500 written reviews, a 4.02 on StoryGraph, and a blurb block stacked with names like R.F. Kuang and Samantha Shannon. The reviews are warmer than they are unanimous, and for readers of this site there is a second question on top of the usual one. Both are worth understanding before you start.

What Is Cleopatra About?

Cleopatra is historical fiction first and fantasy second — StoryGraph readers file it as historical and magical realism rather than fantasy, and romance.io tags it historical, fantasy and ancient times. It is a life story with a political engine: divine gifts run through the royal bloodline and shape the stakes, but the spine is Alexandria, Rome and the succession. It is a character-driven book, not a romance, and 48% of StoryGraph readers call it character-led against 7% who call it plot-led.

The narrator is Cleopatra herself, nineteen when her father dies and the crown lands on her, speaking from after her death with full knowledge of how the story has been told since. What she lacks at the start is security — a treasury in debt to Rome, siblings with their own claims, and no one she can wholly trust except her companion Charmion. What the world assumes about her is written into the book’s three-part structure: the Witch, the Whore and the Villain. The single first-person voice buys intimacy and argument; it costs surprise.

What Makes This Mythic Historical Retelling Work

The voice: Cleopatra addressing the reader directly is the most-praised element. Readers describe her as funny, reflective and furious in turn, and “reclaiming” is the word that recurs across the positive reviews.
The corrective: The book’s core argument — that a woman’s power was rewritten as seduction — lands for most readers, and at least eight of the reviews I read name it as the reason they loved the book.
The mythology: Divine gifts passed through the royal line give the politics supernatural stakes, and Library Journal notes that the gods’ judgments occupy a large share of the story.
The emotional register: StoryGraph readers tag it emotional (69%), adventurous (59%) and reflective (52%), and more than a third call it sad. Grief is the mood that sticks.
The audiobook: Adjoa Andoh’s narration is praised almost without exception, and several listeners say it made them feel Cleopatra herself was telling the story.

Book Synopsis

Cleopatra has been dead for two thousand years, and she has had enough of other people’s versions of her life. So she sits down, in whatever place the gods keep for pharaohs, and starts again from the day she was nineteen and her father’s death made her queen of a country Rome already considers half its own.

The Egypt she inherits is rich, proud and in debt. Her family’s blood carries gifts from the gods — marks and talents that give the Ptolemies their claim and make every sibling a potential rival. Her sister Arsinoe was once the person she trusted most; now their paths are drifting in ways neither of them names. Beside her through all of it is Charmion, the one companion whose loyalty she never has to calculate, and the one the historians barely remember.

Then Rome sends its men. First comes a general who is older, cleverer and more dangerous than any ally she has made, and who might be the only way to keep Egypt Egyptian. Cleopatra knows exactly what the history books will say about what she does next. She is telling you anyway, because this time she means to be the one who decides what it meant — and because she knows, as you do, how it is supposed to end.

My Review

The voice is the reason to read this, and I want to say that first because most of what follows qualifies it. El-Arifi gives Cleopatra a narrator’s confidence that feels earned: dry, wounded, argumentative, and very aware that you have come to her with assumptions. The idea of a dead queen correcting the record chapter by chapter is a strong one, and for long stretches it works exactly as intended. The court and the gods feel lived in, and the grief — for family, for children, for a country — lands.

The second strength is how it handles the men. Caesar and Antony are written as real relationships rather than seductions, and the political logic of each is always visible. Readers who come for the corrective get it in full: this Cleopatra is a scholar, a healer, a mother and a strategist before she is anyone’s lover, and the three-part structure turns the old slanders into chapter headings she gets to answer.

Where it struggles is the framing device, and this is not my private gripe — it is the most repeated criticism in the reviews. Because the narrator already knows how everything ends, she keeps telling you, and at least nine reviewers I read say the constant foreshadowing drains tension out of scenes that should have had it. Right behind it is telling rather than showing: explanation where drama should be. Around that sit the structural complaints — a slow opening, an ending several readers found rushed, a second romance with Antony that one blogger found repetitive after Caesar, and a supporting cast that Kirkus, in an otherwise positive review, faults for motivations left shallow, particularly the sister.

One expectation to reset, and it matters on this site. Cleopatra has been listed as sapphic, and Kirkus says this Cleopatra “loves freely, both men and women.” That is true, but the love stories the book is built around are with Caesar and Antony. Her bond with Charmion is present and tender, but reviewers describe it as somewhere between lover and friend, and almost none of the reader reviews I read mention it at all. If queer representation is what drew you, calibrate; if you wanted a bisexual heroine inside a serious historical novel, you have one.

My honest note: A powerful voice in a book that trusts its reader too little, with a queer thread you have to lean in to hear. If you want a sapphic romance, this is not it. If you want a great woman given her own words back, it is worth the time — and worth hearing on audio.

Element	In Cleopatra
Central relationship	Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, then Marcus Antonius — with Charmion as her lifelong companion, somewhere between confidante and lover
Core tropes	Historical retelling, reclaimed villainess, afterlife narrator, divine gifts, royal sibling rivalry, forbidden love
Setting	Ptolemaic Egypt and Alexandria, first century BCE, with Rome pressing at the border
Heat level	2/5 — behind closed doors
Series	Standalone — complete in one volume
Content notes	Death and murder, war and violence, suicide, child death, death of a parent, animal death, grief, blood and some gore, pregnancy, infidelity, misogyny; a small number of readers also flag incest and an adult/minor relationship

How Spicy Is Cleopatra?

A 2/5. romance.io does index it and rates the steam level “behind closed doors,” though that rests on only 16 ratings, because this is not really a book romance readers are cataloguing. StoryGraph’s crowd-sourced warnings back it up: readers flag sexual content far more often as moderate or minor than graphic. The desire is on the page; the sex mostly is not.

The one thing worth knowing in advance is that the intimacy the book does show is overwhelmingly with Caesar and Antony, and that at least one reviewer felt the age gap and power imbalance with Caesar deserved more scrutiny than it gets. No reviewer I found describes explicit content between Cleopatra and a woman. If you want this heat level with a sapphic couple at the centre, The Mercies and Daughter of the Sun sit in the same band.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you want mythic historical fiction with a narrator who argues with you, you care about reclaimed women more than romance beats, you enjoy grief-heavy endings, and you are happy with a bisexual heroine whose queer bond stays quiet.

You may want to skip it if: constant foreshadowing kills a story for you, you want tension rather than reflection, you need the romance to be sapphic and on the page, or you want a rigorous history of Rome and Egypt rather than an emotional one.

In short: a compelling voice and a real corrective, told by a narrator who cannot stop telling you how it ends.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (October 2026)

This is not a slow-burn discovery story — it is a major-publisher launch doing what those do. Cleopatra came out on 24 February 2026, has gathered 18,206 Goodreads ratings and 4,300 StoryGraph reviews in seven months. The trade coverage is real but measured: Kirkus called it a worthy addition to novels about powerful women without starring it, and Library Journal recommended it in a roundup of Nile-set fiction. Amazon’s Editorial Reviews block, notably, carries no trade quotes at all — only author blurbs, from R.F. Kuang, Samantha Shannon, Tasha Suri, Jennifer Saint and others. On TikTok, much of the visible activity comes from the author’s and her UK publisher’s own accounts, with some reader reviews alongside. Reddit could not be checked from here, so I am not claiming anything about it either way.

The audiobook is part of the story. It is narrated by Adjoa Andoh for Penguin Random House Audio and runs 12 hours 18 minutes, and listener reviews treat her performance as one of the book’s best features.

Prefer audio? Listen to Cleopatra on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The reclamation, first and most consistently — reviewers keep describing a woman finally allowed to speak for herself, and the humanising of Cleopatra beyond the seductress myth comes up in review after review. Then the prose, which readers call lush, lyrical and immersive. The mythology draws specific praise for sitting inside the history rather than on top of it. Cleopatra’s flaws are acknowledged rather than sanded off, which several readers single out. Andoh’s narration has its own fans; one blogger found some Roman accents close to caricature, the only dissent I found.

What readers argue about and complain about: The framing device, above everything. The afterlife narrator who keeps breaking the fourth wall is the most-named problem, and the mechanism is simple: she knows the ending and keeps hinting at it, so scenes lose their tension before they start. Second: telling rather than showing, with events explained instead of dramatised. Third: pacing, which readers describe as both slow at the start and rushed at the end — one 2.5-star blogger said it drags while also skipping large stretches of time. Beyond that, a group of readers found Cleopatra too naive for the political operator history records, some wanted the Caesar and Antony relationships romanticised less, and that same blogger called the book “a tragic love story wrapped in the guise of feminist reclamation.” Opinion divides on the ending, which adds a turn of its own: Library Journal calls it rewarding, one reader was unsure whether she liked it, and another says it pushed her up to five stars.

The standalone question worth asking first: Cleopatra is complete in one volume and requires nothing else. If it sends you to the rest of El-Arifi’s catalogue, know that it is a change of register — her earlier books are the Ending Fire trilogy, beginning with The Final Strife, and the Faebound romantasy trilogy, whose first book was a number one Sunday Times bestseller.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Cleopatra by Saara El-Arifi a sapphic romance?

No. Cleopatra is bisexual and her bond with her companion Charmion is part of the book, but the central love stories are with Julius Caesar and Marcus Antonius. Reviewers describe the Charmion relationship as somewhere between lover and friend.

How spicy is Cleopatra?

A 2/5. romance.io rates it “behind closed doors,” and StoryGraph readers mostly flag its sexual content as moderate or minor rather than graphic. Desire is on the page, but the sex largely is not.

Is Cleopatra a standalone?

Yes. It is a complete, single-volume novel and is not part of Saara El-Arifi’s Ending Fire or Faebound series.

Is Cleopatra historical fiction or fantasy?

Mostly historical fiction. It follows the real arc of Cleopatra’s reign but adds divine gifts passed through the royal bloodline and a strong role for the gods, which is why readers shelve it as both historical fiction and mythology.

Is there a Cleopatra audiobook?

Yes. It is narrated by Adjoa Andoh for Penguin Random House Audio and runs 12 hours 18 minutes. Listeners praise the narration highly, and several say it is the best way to experience the book.

If You Loved Cleopatra, Read These Next

If the confessional voice was the draw, The Confessions of Frannie Langton gives you another woman telling her own story against the version other people wrote, with a love affair between two women at its centre. For history built on real events with a tragic pull, The Mercies sits at the same quiet heat, and there the relationship between two women is the point rather than a footnote. And if you liked a bisexual narrator whose romance is a side thread to a bigger story, Fortune Favors the Dead shares that shape in a lighter key.

For more in this register, browse our guide to lesbian historical fiction books or the full Book Reviews collection.

The Bottom Line

Cleopatra sets out to give one of history’s most slandered women her own voice back, and a lot of it succeeds. The narration is vivid, the mythology is woven in rather than bolted on, and the grief lands. It is also over-explained, heavy with foreshadowing, and quieter about its queer heroine than its reputation suggests. Whether that trade is worth it depends on what you came for — but the reader who wants a great woman telling her own story, ideally in Adjoa Andoh’s voice, will find a moving book here. Check Cleopatra on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Cleopatra ranks as a major-publisher mythic historical retelling with a bisexual heroine — powerfully voiced and emotionally rich, held back by its own foreshadowing, and best approached for the reclaimed queen rather than the romance.